Undertone Static Wash for “mu” fortieth and forty-second part and Song of the Andoumboulou 62

Heads

Before Nod House, bodiless heads bob, afloat, “buried heads brought back / to life…” which is certainly to play with the several kinds of nods we might make out here — folks nodding assent to music or recognition, but also nodded off, on junk or mid-day dream — the drift of head following drift.

“Buried our heads in / Erzulie’s loin musk” Mackey says, which might be what we are brought back from, “blinking, blinded by / the water’s wry perfume” or what waking brings us to, afloat, bodiless, but caught by Erzulie “a dream we were hounded by.” That is, here, desiring, and in the doubled world we make out as bodiless afloat — the bridge perhaps we call Her. Who suspends us.

***

When we invoke the elemental — head afloat on water, water ringed by land — then alterity is elemental change — water that becomes air, the way summer changes to fall, sea or lake bed that is bared. These become ways of talking about how we pass between or get caught out of the story— drowned real that surfaces, suspension that settles out. What we only dream and the way things come apart.

***

With our heads upon the water, we can consider the after-ruin of landscape without water — the flayed dry lake beneath, the air that anneals all that was body, the forgetting in which body becomes sealed. The true opposite of thought that body could never be. White space Mallarmé would say, thought’s the tell of, or thought’s hell.

We can go down that river, body cut away, head song, but for Nub’s tongue keeps track of, “it doesn’t quite work, but is nevertheless beautiful, what’s nub,” nub of it that might be body. Lakebed flooded.

Not white space but nudge.

Under the Water

In my early twenties (1983) I decided to write my Freshman-Sophomore paper on the use of directional motifs in the world’s religions and spiritual thought. East is air is white is spring, South, water, blue and summer; but elsewhere East is fire, and dawn, and light, and South, water, and noon, and childhood. I’d comb the used bookstore’s “spirituality” section or be curled up with “The Book of the Hopi” Alice Baily’s White Lodge nostrums or Hieronymous Storm, so I was thinking of prophecy and whisper, what world we’d come from, what world we might be going to.

The woman I studied with was an old SNCC Quaker who’d established a retreat center on the site of a turn-of-the-century healing springs in Shutesbury, MA. I climbed up the logging road to meet her to ask her to be my advisor; we met near the top of the road. She was naked, pulling a sledge of logs through the wood for work on a retreat hut. White haired, in her late 60s.

Some time later, I went to a weekend there on sacred dance. I had to choreograph a myth, and sitting out on a ledge above a cranberry bog, I thought: in this world, it is as if our heads are above water, and our bodies still below. In the “air” we see world in its Cartesian orders; we orient by sight and chart; we imagine this is the world we live in, imagine that these rational orders are more true in sight’s haptic. Even if we are in Paris, the trees are square, the roads straight lines despite the river.

And so we choose not to notice: that air is liquid, a medium, breath between rather than empty grid. We forget: the head pulled off its body falls into the basket. Blood spurts, the body on the other side of the blade.

We imagine houses for our heads — call them computers, game systems, helmets. We are almost separate. To be no-subject keeps alive the dream of freedom.

I thought: all that underwater body, desire gone deep forgotten, Freud called “unconscious,” pulls us nevertheless true like a plumb-line. Body we have to pull along with us. Thing we don’t otherwise digest into its relevancies that drops, pulls, insists, to which we must balance. Stone we stumble on. Body that drifts off into the depths as if in veils, drags with it the kitchen stove from my first house, street signs, things forgotten by others I’ve gotten stuck with, coins, urgencies, vignettes, murders. Body that mingles with other bodies so that what we can speak of telepathy or love, the way I find myself in you, entangled. Slip knots. The places where our bodies pass through each other even though we sit apart.

And so I made a dance of putting my head back under the water into and after the lost. I thought we might could “dive into desire” even if Adrienne was right and it was a wreck.

I thought, when we dream of freedom, we put on “Blows Against the Empire and hope the starship will take us, up away into the air’s freedom; we read the world for clues as to where the Close Encounter will occur. We hope we are chosen and can find ourselves in the apparent forever that is air. Hopi Fifth World coming.

I thought maybe there’s a different way out that’s not into air.

The great angels who’d endured the century of war since Melville might have begun departing in the 50s, but like all things angelic, it might be that they were only going, as they always do, towards God. And what else could that be but also a falling back into we might best think also, not by leaping after them, but by turning back like they do towards return.

I thought “singing head bear body’s ink.”

Tails

And somewhere the bodies without heads as well, the head here, but the torso? Over there in the reeds? Osirin torso that is dark cut into twelve parts?

Torso that is thumb, tomb, dumb stub of a tumor Sanskrit calls soma (choosing the sibilant over the tack). Lump we’d call linga, turbulent stone, thub phallus were we to instrumentalize, wander our fingers over, this that that we are there. It’s stutter, or what H.D. called “edge,” “herm.” The hem of her skirt that becomes a shell. Nub’s knot.

This there that is not smooth like Ma, in its dreams it was a falcon. This that, “there is no place that does not see you,” surrounds you, we are at stake in, however parsed it gets, however sere.

That we really don’t know we called it. That memory isn’t but insists. There the being called “creaturely” we recall — the wind of the open its shape makes. Towards we are left with, the what’s behind our back in any room, in any landscape, that going there that is the future not yet.

The shape of that already in the just-body. Reverberate lump. What’s silent under the water. What’s silent in the ear. All that noise of was.

-

The Walls

The work of two sequences allows us to score a long line down the direction of any song. Here we are bodiless in black gnostic pool where sound alone survives that head that is not body hears. Over there, cement skies and a mythic situation that abuts a more recognizable world of elections and war and hide-out lounges. Ghost dances on the disco floor. The come-apart the music starts again Mackey calls “One /was / dreaming us again, lost to us dreaming, / dream- / ing us lost / again. The double-up that two gives us, the laid over quilt.

Edge doesn’t match over here, or over there, one overlaid onto another, not snakeskin but thickening — two dreams deep and then four. Enough that even though there’s nothing holding anything up, there anyway are the walls. You could put your hand through, yes, but also touch. How impossibly durable though there is no time — how full of forty years anyway and not yet gone that will be gone.

We don’t work this up by one logic but by a series of calls that don’t resolve — two tracks divergent in the sand and the resonant between. His koan “Mu” and Andoumboulou, head one way, body the other. The grim reap of the lolling head, the kicked-around of the trope and the rose-garden, call it “kids again / crouched /catching tadpoles” it’s echoing green.